Contextualising Phan Khôi (1928–1932)- Chapter II: The Woman Question
Chapter II: The Woman Question
During the first fifty years of French colonial intervention in Vietnam, the colonial apparatus put increasing emphasis on the question of women’s emancipation and incorporation into an imagined modern Vienamese community. This colonial project intersected with conversations among members of the traditionally male-dominated literati, to which Phan Khôi belonged, as well as a small but growing class of female urban public
intellectuals, whose colonial educations had prepared them to contribute vigorously to this debate. Together, these three influences contributed to more novel expressions of the ‘Self’ and ensuing intellectual ruptures.
The ‘Woman Question’ debate particularly intensified during the interwar period as new mediums offered new spaces for these contesting discourses. As mentioned in the previous chapter, mediums of print, press and translation were expanding rapidly and playing key roles in this transnational circulation of ideas surrounding the link between womanhood and modernity in the colonised Vietnamese urban sphere. sphere. For example, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed an explosion of new female-focused publications in all three regions of colonial Vietnam: Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. A major case study is the popular Phụ Nữ Tân Văn (“Women’s New Periodical”) which mainly circulated in Saigon in Cochinchina between 1929 and 1934 (52). Phan Khôi was this journal’s star essayist and his contributions helped propagate relatively radical ideas concerning women’s emancipation and women’s roles in an imagined community, blending both the traditional Confucian sphere and the discourses of the supposedly ‘modern’ West. Yet, Phan Khôi’s arguments and mediations also contributed to a highly contested male-centric discussion on Vietnamese womanhood. This chapter contextualises Phan Khôi’s contributions to this conversation through his pieces in Phụ Nữ Tân Văn and other journals between 1928 and 1932. By going beyond traditional
Sino-Vietnamese and Franco-Vietnamese binaries, as well as showing Phan Khôi’s critical engagement with a greater global conversation on said debate to as far as Turkey and Sweden, it analyses how different transnational ideas of womanhood circulated and were contested within the urban colonised Vietnamese space. It concludes that these discussions on womanhood were as intense and colourful as parallel conversations in semi-colonial China and colonised Korea during this period.
Background to the Woman Question in colonial Vietnam
In order to understand the Woman Question in urban colonial Vietnam, we must contextualise the changing perceptions of Vietnamese women within the French colonial project, the shifting male-dominated elite and the wider transnational debate on womanhood and modernity in colonised and semi-colonised settings. Since the establishment of the Indochinese Union in 1887, at a theoretical and institutional level, the French colonial project attempted to redefine ‘Vietnamese authenticity’ as a way to break the cultural link between Vietnam and the rest of Confucian Asia. The goal was ultimately to assert an allegedly more novel and modern French cultural apparatus as the dominant system of knowledge and cultural production. It can be said the Orientalist reimagination of Vietnamese womanhood was part of this effort.
The French colonial project perceived Vietnamese women as markers of “cultural authenticity”, similar to their Chinese neighbours. At the same time, they also perceived them as victims lacking agency under the traditional Confucian hierarchy. Within the context of the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, which ignited stronger demands for
pan-Asian collaboration in anti-imperialist efforts and an emerging Chinese nationalist movement, it was imperative for the French colonial apparatus to break these possible transnational links in order to consolidate their rule and effectively pacify Vietnam (53). Thus,
one task of the Orientalist institution École française d’Extrême-Orient (French School of the Far East, EFEO), established in 1907, was to effectively construct a separate corpus of anthropological and ethnological knowledge concerning Vietnamese cultural authenticity and to highlight cultural diversity within the French empire. By re-interpreting historical texts and institutions, the EFEO sought to distinguish Vietnamese womanhood from the wider Confucian sphere and establish notions of a separate, ancient, and more tolerant place for Vietnamese women in contrast to their northern neighbours.
These efforts would thereby demonstrate a Vietnamese readiness for Western civilisation and colonial ‘modernisation’ (54). Such efforts effectively distinguished Vietnamese identity and naturalised the French colonial project. This is what Edward Said would refer to as a ‘secularising tendency’, in which the Vietnamese ‘Orient’ is ‘rescued’ and ‘restored’ to the temporal ‘present’ by the secular EFEO. The supposed uniqueness of the Vietnamese ‘Orient’ is ultimately recognised within a colonised cultural apparatus (55). Thus, ‘authentic’ Vietnamese womanhood would be redefined as what the coloniser believed to be a recovered Vietnamese self.
Albeit divided between the establishment and non-establishment, of which Phan Khôi belonged to the latter, the indigenous elite debated and reimagined the roles of women for a more modern Vietnamese polity. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the early 1900s saw a rise in a new class of reform-minded scholar-officials who had yet to break away from the
Confucian sphere, but instead utilised that link to advocate for fundamental political and cultural changes. In particular, one of these changes was greater incorporation of the woman into an imagined polity. As early as 1907, the short-lived but influential Hanoi-based Đông
Kinh Nghĩa Thục (Tonkin Free School), which was part of the greater nationwide movement for modernisation, encouraged women to attend public lectures on topics ranging from history and culture to politics. All the more, the School also recruited two female teachers of Classical Chinese and the Romanised Quốc ngữ script (56).
The impact of these lectures and the Tonkin Free School are difficult to measure due to the prevailing female illiteracy, but we can examine oral transmissions in the form of poetic verses and chants that remained prevalent in Vietnamese cultural life throughout French colonial rule. These oral traditions were employed to communicate ideas of the modernisation movement and the School in particular. Composed primarily by elite male lỉterati within standard literary conventions, these poems aimed to encourage women to partake in education. While these poems remained somewhat conservative by articulating women’s roles as that of enlightened spouses and virtuous mothers, they simultaneously reflected an increased awareness of international affairs and European history. For example one anonymous poem entitled “Vợ khuyên chồng ” (“The Wife Counsels the Husband”), included references to historical figures such as Bismarck and Gladstone as well as Joan of Arc and the French female revolutionary Madame Roland as examples worth emulating for both spouses (57). Thus, despite its moderately conservative content, such cultural productions also demonstrated a linear progression in ideas regarding the Woman Question and the employment of female hagiography, which would become apparent in the urban print boom
of the 1920s and 1930s. Furthermore, through oral transmissions, transnational ideas reached an even greater audience due to illiteracy. Yet, this form of circulation is difficult to quantify as well as susceptible to elite interference when recorded. At the same time, poetry could be re-considered as an intellectual category, moving beyond Orientalist notions of ‘folklore’, as a way to re-assess the circulation of cultural ideas of transformation of the ‘Self’ in historiography. historiography. Even a figure who later embraced print and new linear literary genres such as Phan Khôi continued to dabble in poetry as a means of communicating his evolving ideas of the ‘Self’.
The policy of Pháp Việt đề huề (Franco-Vietnamese Harmony and Collaboration) under governor-general Albert Sarraut between 1911 and 1919 and its measures following the First World War contributed to further ruptures to the Woman Question. This policy sought to legitimise the French presence in Vietnam via the dual goal of promoting collaboration between the French colonial administration and local elites, as well as introducing liberal reforms (58). In particular, new press laws in 1917 allowed for greater publication of newspapers, books and translations (59). This measure attracted the support of many Vietnamese elites, many of whom started their own publications across the three corners of Vietnam and Phan Khôi eventually served as a contributor to a number of them, as mentioned in the previous chapter (60). Furthermore, the abolition of the traditional male-dominated mandarinate examinations in 1919 allowed for the advent of a post-Mandarin Franco-Vietnamese colonial education system of which elite women were beneficiaries (61). As noted by Nguyên Van Ky, by 1920, many Vietnamese women held university degrees and eleven of them were granted fellowships to study in France (62). Presumably, many more would have received some form of
colonial education. Thus, this new class of educated elite women would have a greater share in the circulation of ideas of ‘Self’ with the regards to womanhood in an urban colonial setting in the interwar period. All the more, these opportunities allowed them to contribute to the reimagination of the Vietnamese polity alongside their male counterparts.
Building blocks for a colonial female public sphere
The post-1919 period witnessed a boom in print culture in urban colonial Vietnam that allowed for transnational ideas of the ‘Self’ to further circulate among an ever expanding audience. At the same time, through mediums of print, press and translation, competing discourses surrounding the ‘Woman Question’ entered the public consciousness throughout the 1920s, with the period between 1928 and 1932 in particular serving as a transitional period to the increased radicalism of the 1930s and Phan Khôi acting as the principal intermediary.
As a point of reference, one could observe similar debates in other semi-colonised and colonised spaces, especially Republican China. Vietnamese intellectuals were well aware of developments in China and applied these ideas to their own surroundings. In particular, within Republican China, through mass movements such as the May Fourth and New Culture Movements, there were vibrant discussions among its mostly male participants over the role of women’s emancipation in building the new nation, including questioning the role of traditional institutions and customs in perpetuating women’s oppression. Significantly, this discussion in print introduced new vocabularies in reference to women such as “progress” (“jinbu”, ‘tiến bộ ’), “emancipation” (“jiefang”, ‘giải phóng’), and the “social contact between men and women” (“nannu shejiao”, ‘nam nữ xã giao’), among others (63). This vocabulary might have gained currency in colonial Vietnam through the Overseas Chinese (Hoa kiều ) community in urban enclaves such as Chợ Lớn in Cochinchina where Chinese-language texts were still circulated and translated by the likes of Phan Khôi. Yet, others such as Shawn McHale have argued that the 1920s and 1930s saw a shift away from the East Asian cultural sphere toward Western (French) and Vietnamese ones, which resulted in competing Vietnamese approaches to modernity, the ‘Woman Question’ in particular (64). As in the rest of 64
the chapter, despite some merits to this argument with regards to younger Vietnamese intellectuals educated in Franco-Vietnamese schools, it is also reductive to posit a simple and linear shift away from the Confucian sphere and toward a Western and supposedly authentic Vietnamese conversation. Instead, in order to account for many nuances and exceptions, we emphasize the active mediation of knowledge from both spheres by local intellectuals throughout the 1920s.
With regards to the Woman Question, the transmission of knowledge from both Europe and China through print materials served as a key building block for a more modern public sphere for both men and women within the constraints of an oppressive colonial apparatus. In turn, this modern and secular public sphere enabled Woman Question debates to flourish.
This inclusive public sphere received a particular boost through increased educational opportunities for women after the abolition of the traditional mandarinate examinations and the advancement of a modern colonial education system. For example, in the 1922–1923 academic year, female students of elite girl’s colleges accounted for 54 percent of the total
number of students at upper primary level (“enseignement primaire-supérieur”). That said, access remains limited and female students only accounted for six percent of students at secondary level and no figures are available for female enrolment in tertiary education (65). Despite the inequity in access to colonial education, we can say that some level of literacy in either the Romanised Quốc ngữ script or French was expanding among urban women, allowing for an urban female readership to form during this period.
Alongside this expanding female readership, both moderate and conservative elite Vietnamese were becoming much more engaged with questions of women’s roles in an imagined modern Vietnamese polity, even if these roles were prescribed based on traditionalist assumptions. During this period, numerous textbooks and pamphlets for women’s education were published as part of the explosion in print. These texts were mostly
written by male authors of traditional outlook who advocated for practical skills and training for elite women alongside the maintenance of traditional patriarchal values such as the Confucian notions of “three submissions” (“tam tòng”) and “four virtues” (“tứ đức ”) and the confinement of women within the domestic sphere. An example would be a textbook titled Nữ quốc dân tu tri (Know-hows for Female Citizens), composed in 1926 by the Confucian-trained revolutionary Phan Bội Châu for the Huế-based Nữ Công Học Hội (Women’s Labour-Study Association), one of the first officially-sanctioned women’s associations founded in colonial Vietnam. This text was accessed through the Gallica digital
collection of the French national library. The text is a series of instructions for young females in speech, manners, behaviours in the form of short and memorable poems, which could be transmitted orally. The first poem of the first chapter, which focuses on general morality (“Đạo lý chung”), frames the matriarch (mẹ) as the source of quốc dân (national citizenry)
and thus, the duty of the ‘virtuous’ (“hiền ”) matriarch is to raise ‘saintly’ (“thánh”) citizens of an imagined national polity, especially daughters who would eventually be mothers themselves (67). This framing establishes a key role for modern womanhood in the formation of national citizenry, albeit one based on the role of virtuous mother and wife. We could also
examine one of the appendices for this text, which includes a speech delivered by the same author on the opening day of the Women’s Labour-Study Association. Parts of this speech deal with ways to approach and reconcile “Eastern” and “Western” moralities in relations to the Woman Question (68). The author compares and contrasts the two, arguing the former emphasises obedience while the latter advocates independence. Based on these differences, the central message is one must absorb and harmonise the advantages of those contradictory moralities in order to build a stable and prosperous family and, in turns, produce a stable and
prosperous society. The author’s analysis could also be interpreted as reductive by attempting to establish a simplistic East-West binary.
In general, the expansion of the print world in the 1920s, coupled with increased female literacy due to increased educational opportunities and elite men being increasingly interested in making good wives and mothers for the nation, allowed for the framing of the Woman Question in a larger elite discussion of building the Vietnamese nation. Moreover, this
framing of the Woman Question contributed critically to a developing cultural conception of the national ‘Self’ within the confinement of colonial modernity.
Phan Khôi’s transnational vision for Vietnamese womanhood
The discussions in these female-focused materials, by both female and male contributors, paved the way for the radicalisation of the Woman Question by the 1930s. The most prominent example was the highly successful Phụ Nữ Tân Văn (Women’s New Periodical, PNTV), founded by Madame Nguyễn Đức Nhuận in Saigon. It ran between 1929 and 1934,
of which Phan Khôi was a prominent contributor. At its peak, it averaged about 8500 copies a week over two years before the Great Depression, which demonstrated its appeal and significance within the colonised Vietnamese public sphere (69). Thus, the rest of this chapter focuses on Phan Khôi’s vision for Vietnamese womanhood through his paper trail with PNTV on various aspects of the Question between 1929 and 1932 and how transnational ideas of the ‘Self’ were debated upon between Phan and others, within Vietnam and beyond.
The historiography of the Woman Question in colonial Vietnam has largely viewed Phan Khôi as a bourgeois moderate who retained a patriarchal Confucian mindset and who was eventually challenged by more radical contemporaries. An example of this narrative is David Marr’s brief discussion of an exchange between Phan Khôi and a reader in an August
1932 publication. In his article, Phan Khôi argued for ideological changes in the Vietnamese “worldview” (“nhân sanh quan”) as a key element to women’s liberation. Phan Khôi’s arguments were rebutted by a reader named Nguyễn Thị Chính, who rooted for Marxist materialist notions of “historical progress” and “modes of production”. While the contrast
between Phan and Nguyễn’s perspectives speaks to the increased radicalisation of Vietnamese approaches to the Woman Question and the emergence of the Communist movement by the early 1930s, Phan’s ideas receive little substantive engagement. Marr’s framing reflected the
‘revolutionary’ narrative that remained prevalent in scholarship on Vietnamese cultural history in the 1980s, as well as the lack of access to Phan Khôi’s literature at that point. Yet, the increased availability of Phan’s works and his intellectual contributions to PNTV in particular present an opportunity to re-examine the evolving Woman Question debate in the
transitional period of 1928–1932 by restoring transnational context and avoiding a communist teleology.
In reality, while many intellectuals continued to champion women’s confinement to the domestic sphere, Phan’s writings for PNTV demonstrate his advocacy for increased female involvement in the public sphere, particularly through literature. Due to prevalent female illiteracy and centuries of Confucian influences, literature remained highly a male-dominated field in Vietnam but Phan argued there was an imperative for a distinct Vietnamese female body of literature to be established. Despite increasing female literacy and involvement in the public sphere, there remained only exceptional cases of esteemed and available writings by Vietnamese women (71). In another piece, Phan even argued that womanhood was a natural subject for literature that had been appropriated by male writers throughout history to convey personal emotions and sensibilities in their own works (72). Thus, according to Phan, it was vital
for women to re-appropriate this tradition and take the initiative to express their own voices through literature. Even though Phan Khôi’s conception of femininity remained relatively conservative in terms of perceiving women as intrinsically emotional beings, his argument for greater female involvement in literature as a potential avenue for further participation in
the colonial public sphere also demonstrated a desire to re-imagine the Vietnamese female ‘Self’ in an imagined polity through greater involvement in formulating new traditions.
Phan’s arguments were not without controversy and received conservative pushback, which can be seen through a response written by Thế Phụng in the Saigon-based journal Công Luận (Public Rhetoric). Here, the author displayed his objections to Phan’s point on the relationship between literature and womanhood, in which he counter-argued that women are
too emotionally vulnerable to produce literature, thus remaining inferior to their male counterparts even in Western countries with well-developed literacy scenes such as France (73). This counter-argument was put down by Phan Khôi in a rebuttal, in which he criticised the lack of a precise definition for ‘womanhood’, which rendered Thế Phụng’s points mute and
defended his argument as purely a hypothesis (“hypothèse”) that required further research and scrutiny (74). These pieces demonstrate not only the contours of this debate, but also how the ‘Woman Question’ in interwar colonial Vietnam remained mostly an all-male affair, as it had been in Republican China. It is thus noteworthy that even into the 1930s, as a distinctly modern Vietnamese literary scene took shape surrounding the Tự lực văn đoàn (Self-Strengthening Literary Group), there were still few female writers and women continued to be literary subjects rather than active participants even among a younger and more radical generation of Vietnamese writers (75).
While pushing for greater female involvement in the literary public sphere, Phan Khôi mirrored his fellow reformists in re-defining women’s roles within the domestic sphere. As seen in Phan Bội Châu’s textbook, this reformist agenda centered on the role of virtuous matriarchs in raising virtuous sons and daughters for an imagined national polity. In another
essay for PNTV, Phan pushed for similar arguments. In this piece, he introduced and interpreted the ideas of the Swedish feminist scholar Ellen Key, who espoused the virtue of ‘motherhood’ as an integral element of womanhood and Phan further elaborated how that trait played out through anecdotes on the selfless deeds of the matriarch of Cố Viêm Võ (顧
炎武), a late Ming and early Qing scholar as a historical illustration of Ellen Key’s ideas and a case of female hagiography. Phan Khôi likely accessed Ellen Key’s ideas in colonial Vietnam through French translations of her writings from Swedish. Thus, one could construct a transnational dialogue between Phan Khôi and Ellen Key on womanhood. In one of her
essays, Ellen Key described women as possessing distinctive traits from men, such as decreased individuality, but increased consideration for others, which could also be viewed as maternal (77). She also envisaged the woman of the future as contributing to the public sphere in arts, culture, and science, while also protecting mankind from ‘excess culture’, possibly referring to overindulgence, thus retaining that motherhood (78). Phan Khôi would likely have agreed with many of these ideas and sought to reconcile them with Confucian traditions of motherhood to construct his own conception of ‘modern’ Vietnamese womanhood as cultivated, virtuous and selfless matriarchs who would raise citizens for an imagined modern Vietnamese nation. In short, Phan mediated between different cultural spheres to inform his own construction of the ‘Self’.
The case of Ellen Key also brings to attention a crucial element of Phan Khôi’s writings on the Woman Question, which is introducing and circulating foreign examples and ideas through translation, to inform contesting visions of modernity elsewhere as building blocks for a distinct vision of the modern Vietnamese ‘Self’. A particular example of this practice was Phan Khôi’s translation of an article on Turkish women in various fields in relations to Turkey’s modernisation efforts under Ataturk post-World War I, originally published on the Chinese women’s journal “Phụ nữ tạp chí” (“Funü zazhi”, “The Ladies Journal”)(79). Nonetheless, Phan Khôi attempted to inspire similar practical and institutional endeavours in the advancement of Vietnamese women as a reflection of the advancement of Vietnamese nationhood based on the Turkish example, albeit within a restricted colonial setting.
Along this line, Phan extensively espoused the example of the women’s movement in Korea, which shared similar circumstances with Vietnam Culturally, both countries were centuries-old members of the Confucian sphere, looking to China for inspiration, but ultimately fell victim to Western-styled imperialism. However, Phan also pointed out Vietnam had a more illustrious record of women holding prominent leadership roles, such as the legendary Trưng Sisters and Lady Triệu, compared to their more subservient Korean counterparts. Despite these commonalities and differences, he also emphasised that the Korean movement was more established and proactive than its Vietnamese counterpart, shown by significant female participation in the anti-Japanese March 1st Movement of 1919, as well as hagiographic treatments of female activists forming progressive women’s associations by 1924 and 1928, respectively. Thus, in one way, shaming Vietnamese women for not being proactive enough compared to their Korean counterparts from a patriarchal point of view, but along with the Turkish example, demonstrating contesting visions of modern womanhood as well as a rhetorical appeal for social and political actions. It is worth noting within colonial Korea in this period, similar to Vietnam, there were intense debates regarding the relationship between nation and gender, in which the dual goals of ‘wise mother and good wife’ were seen as integral to women’s liberation and ultimately, the
re-imagination of the Korean nation but eventually became more radicalised in subsequent decades (81). Moreover, as Korea was a part of the Confucian sphere, their intelligentsia were also absorbing transnational ideas being circulated via China and Japan through mediums of print, press, and translation. Thus, this process also shows how Phan maintained Confucian cultural connections to conduct indirect dialogues through translation for the purpose of receiving and adapting new ideas for a local audience. Furthermore, the employment of female hagiography as a literary device during this period also presented an attempt to incorporate Vietnam into a wider transnational discussion on the Woman Question.
Furthermore, while his perspectives on the Woman Question remained somewhat limited, it expresses a desire to break away from age-old traditions and beliefs, as well as continuously informing himself through his autodidactism. Another example was his take on the issue of marriage and divorce through a short commentary on divorce in Poland (“Phô-lôn”, “Pologne”). Through the Polish anecdote, he argued how increased marital
separation does not represent a degradation of traditions but rather the contrary, to which women are no longer pressured and wrongfully condemned by society for divorcing their spouses as an allusion to emancipation in terms of marriage (82). Thus, espousing greater
freedom of choice for Vietnamese women in marriage as a microcosm of an advancing society as well as the possibility that traditions could be reformed according to the changing times. Moreover, this expresses the idea that an emancipated woman is beneficial for society. While it may be hard to identify based on a small selection of essays and commentaries, it is possible to say that Phan Khôi’s contributions to the Woman Question for PNTV between 1929 and 1932 demonstrate a gradual progression in Phan’s conception of the Vietnamese feminine ‘Self’ and women’s emancipation in general in relations to the building of a modern Vietnamese identity within a colonised setting, through his mediation of ideas from different cultural spaces. That is, until he was eventually superseded by younger, more radical contemporaries who inherited many of his ideas.
In general, due to a largely untouched corpus of work, there is a potential for further research into Phan’s intellectual contributions, as well as those of his Vietnamese counterparts, to the relationship between Woman Question and cultural conceptions of the ‘Self’ within a wider transnational intellectual historical canon in the interwar period. Equally, the debates on similar issues within a colonised context through print, press, and translation. As it is in later chapters, Phan Khôi’s inputs in other issues and discussions du jour show similar developments.
52 David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (London: University of California Press, 1981), 222.
53 Nhung Tuyet Tran, “Woman as Nation: Tradition and Modernity Narratives in Vietnamese Histories,” Gender & History 24, no. 2 (August 2012): 413.
54 Tran, “Woman as Nation.” 414.
55 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 121.
56 David Marr, “The 1920s Women’s Rights Debates in Vietnam,” The Journal of Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (May, 1976): 375.
57 “…Tỉ ( Bismarck)diện, Cách (Gladstone) mi quân đối kính,
Qua (Joan of Arc) tình, La (Madame Roland) tứ thiếp lâm trang.”
Cited in Nguyễn Hiến Lê, Đông kinh Nghĩa thục (Tonkin Free School) (Saigon: Lá Bối, 1968), 69.
58 Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 115
59 See chapter 1.
60 Goscha, Vietnam, 116.
61 Ben Tran, Post-Mandarin Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 77.
62 Nguyên Van Ky, “Rethinking the Status of Vietnamese Women in Folklore and Oral History,” in Viêt Nam Exposé: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Society, ed. Gisele Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002), 100.
63 Christina Kelley Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (London: University of California Press, 1995), 22.
64 Shawn McHale, “Printing and Power: Vietnamese Debates over Women’s Place in Society in Society, 1918–1934,” in Essays Into Vietnamese Pasts, eds. K.W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore (Cornell: SEAP Publications, 1995), 175.
65 ‘Pour l’année 1922–1923, l’effectif des collèges de jeunes filles… fut légèrement supérieur à celui des EPS de garçons dans le cours élémentaires (713 contre 604, soit 54,14% de l’effectif total) mais la proportion s’inversera largement au niveau secondaire (105 contre 1626, soit 6,06% du total).’ Bui Trân Phuong, “Viêt Nam 1918–1945, genre et modernité,” (PhD diss., l’Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008), 71.
66 David Marr, “The 1920s Women’s Rights Debates in Vietnam,” The Journal of Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (May, 1976): 380.
67 ‘…Bởi mẹ (quốc-dân), 國民 là phần con gái,
Mẹ hiền con thánh, mẹ dữ con ngây
Mẹ là ai đây, chị em ta đó…”
Phan Bội Châu, Nữ quốc dân tu tri (Know-how for Female Citizens) (Huế: Nữ-Công Học-Hội (Women’s Labour-Study Association)), 1926), 3.
68 Phan, Nữ quốc, 19–20.
69 Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, 220.
70 Ibid, 236.
71 Here, Phan Khôi cited the cases of Nôm poets Nguyễn Thị Điểm , Hồ Xuân Hương, Huyện Thanh Quan, of which the latter two’s works are still considered national literary treasures to this day. He also referred to more minor cases such as Phạm Lâm Anh from his home province of Quảng Nam, as well as the daughters of late Nguyễn emperor Ming Mạng.
However, the point was to show the number of female literary figures and the corresponding corpus of work remained too few in between to constitute a distinct body of literature. Phan Khôi, “Về văn học của phụ nữ Việt Nam” (On Vietnamese Women’s Literature), Phụ nữ tân văn, no. 1, May 2, 1929.
72 Some of the historical examples cited by Phan Khôi included the Confucian text Classic Poetry, which is part of the Five
Classics, as well as the Chinese poets Qu Yuan and Du Fu. Interestingly, he also cited the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament as a component of Hebrew literary traditions.
Phan Khôi, “Văn học với nữ tánh” (Literature and Womanhood), Phụ nữ tân văn, no. 2, May 9, 1929.
73 Thê Phụng, “Phụ nữ đối với văn học” (Women and Literature), Công Luận, May 22, 1929
74 Phan Khôi, “Bài trả lời của ông Phan Khôi” (Phan Khôi’s written response), Phụ nữ tân văn, no. 6, June 6, 1929.
75 Ben Tran, “I Speak in the Third Person: Women and Language in Colonial Vietnam,” positions: asia critique 21, no.3 (Summer 2013): 581–582.
76 Phan Khôi, “Một cái gương sáng cho người làm mẹ” (A shining example for mothers), Phụ nữ tân văn, no. 19, September 5, 1929.
77 Ellen Key, The Morality of Woman and Other Essays (Chicago: The Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co., 1911), 72.
78 Key, The Morality of Woman, 44.
79 Phan Khôi, “Đàn bà mới của một nước mới Thổ Nhĩ Kỳ” (The New Women of A New Turkey), Phụ nữ tân văn, no. 51, May 8, 1930.
80 Phan Khôi, “Cuộc phụ nữ vận động ở nước Triều Tiên” (The Women’s Movement in Korea), Phụ nữ tân văn, no. 138, June 6, 1932.
81 Jiyoung Suh, “The “New Woman” and the Topography of Modernity in Colonial Korea,” Korean Studies 37 (2014): 19–20.
82 Phan Khôi, “Sự vợ chồng ly dị ở nước Phô-lôn” (Divorce in Poland), Phụ nữ tân văn 159, July 14, 1932.
